Difussionism and the Future

If I was at home this summer and had unlimited time to think and write, I might be working a bit on my little pseudoarchaeology book. One of the things that has struck me lately is how much science fiction is vaguely dependent on diffusionist views of the future. 

Difussionism, loosely, is the largely discredited idea that culture spread from a single source to the entire world. In the hands of pseudoarchaeologists, diffusionist ideas have helped explain the appearance, say, of pyramids in Central America and Egypt.

Reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, for example, we encounter a future where all of humanity survives in a since massive spaceship (appropriately called the Gilgamesh). In a similar vein, Becky Chambers’ novel Record of a Spaceborn Few in her Wayfarer series focuses on the residents of the “Exodus Fleet” which carried the rest of the human race away from a dying earth. Of course, similar themes appear in shows like Battlestar Galactica, as just one example, where humanities is confined to a fleet of ships who escape from a destroyed world.

Of course, these images of a unified humanity bound by a common culture conflate our species with our society in a way that only science fiction can. I wonder how much these visions of our future have drawn influence from discredited views of the past and continue to infuse these views with a kind of plausibility.